Monetary Policy: Processes and Policies

Monetary integration has had an ill-starred journey throughout the twenty year life of the European Community. The issue has been raised most recently by Commission President Roy Jenkins. Its repeated revival, along with the recurrent failures to achieve a sustained success, reveal both its central place in Community affairs and the peculiar difficulties of harnessing monetary policy to the Community team of coordinated policy instruments. Whether the European Economic Community achieves more substantial integration in the future depends on whether it meets three conditions indicated by our account of past experiences: a political decision by members to accelerate progress toward unification; stable, roughly paral lel economic performance among member countries; and the abatement of present turbulence in the international mone tary system which, in turn, requires a recommitment of the United States to major reform.